Did something go wrong?

Lol, yes, 2018 was a turbulent year indeed. But thankfully we got through it.

 

Insincere??!? Coming from a bad place??!?

As Darth Snow said, I wasn't around here when TLJ or TROS came out so I admit I might be missing some old context here. But in all the discussions I've engaged in regarding the ST, I've been surprised by the amount of vitriol and bizarre counter arguments I've gotten when I've said----gasp!-----I didn't like the last two films.

Again, if some of you liked all three and gave the ST a big 'thumb's up,' great for you!!! Continue to enjoy them. But please do so without feeling the need to engage in revisionist history by villainizing 'the media' or calling the arguments of ST detractors insincere. No one can (or should) tell you what to like. But that principle works both ways. It's silly to pretend that a sizable segment of Star Wars fandom weren't hugely disappointed by them and had good, sincere reasons for feeling that way they did.

 

Let's continue to not do that then?

 

As been said many times before. There should be no they and us. There should just be us. And it doesn't help to always point out that one group was poisonous against the other, because:
1. It wasn't true for all of them.
2. There were poisonous people in both groups.
3. All groups are part of us as a whole fandom.
let's face it. People like the Movies or don't like the movies.
But emotions drive us to passionately defend our position and some reached way too far.
And as it is most of the time, arguments for disliking or liking the movies are mostly far away from being objective truth.

 

To be clear, there are only those who love Yoda and those who do not(dead to me).

 

The ST has been over for at least four years. Some people liked it, some people loved it and some hated it. The same could be said for the PT and the OT (yes, there are people out there who disliked the first trilogy). We all have our own opinions of them. What else is there to add?

 

A lot of people thought they knew what had to come next after TFA and were upset that their predictions weren't rewarded by TLJ. Some people just didn't love TLJ right away like they had TFA (similar to ESB). And then there's the mixture of sad sacks who take shots at everything "Disney" and indulge all their the imaginary culture war buzzwords.

People tend to want to enhance the stature of their displeasure. So some were happy to group all the above categories and claim that the movie was divisive and had split the fanbase, after failing to convince us that "everybody" the fact that.... for instance... Finn didn't spend the movie swooning after Rey and vice versa. Or the classic "I didn't get the storyline involving Luke Skywalker that I had hoped for....but I was forced to watch him drink green milk!"

I think the reasons that some people were resentful of TLJ aren't that complex or deep.

 

The thing that puzzles me the most is how people came to the conclusion that Finn, who's last meaningful line in the movie was "I'm just here to get Rey", had done almost three movies worth of character development by the end of TFA and expected him to be a Resistance leader and training to be Jedi, based on an almost subliminal indication that he might have slightly heightened perception.

 

Funnily enough. I recently read a post on another forum, from a poster who has continuously shared their disapproval of TLJ ruining everything for the past 6 years. They used a quote from Diego Luna where he was acknowledging that you get a lot of feedback from fans and critics on social media to consider. Which is the type of thing that people in the industry say to let people know that their engagement is valued, please keep engaging etc. That got turned into "Proof that Disney rewrote TLJ in response to social media demanding that Rey be a nobody". The problem is that the same poster also has threads from a few years back complaining about how Johnson willfully subverted the popular expectations, which were all shared on social media, about Rey being related to x, y or z legacy character.

I'm not saying that's typical of the commentary or commentators on TLJ. But it's not uncommon either. I think what it, and a lot of the comments over the past 6 years illustrates is a lot of people trying to come to terms with their relationship with the ongoing franchise and struggling to realise that endorsement and approval of what came before does not equate to ownership or authorship. Sometimes people would rather worry that they have been unduly dispossessed and another, unworthy section of the audience is being unduly rewarded with what they want than to accept that it was never really yours or written for you in the first place.

 

Less common than not caring about the question because you're part of the general audience, and more common than loving or hating the trilogy as a whole.

This is true of every trilogy, d*** near anyway.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I too am most curious to see how people's feelings about the ST change over time.

 

You act like that's a bad thing. The Number #1 goal of any film franchise is to engage its audience to the point where the story and its characters become personal to them. It's that level of engagement that leads to the growth of a franchise (more ticket sales, more merch, etc.)

So when you are producing new content for a beloved franchise, the question becomes, "How do we keep our built-in audience engaged?" It's damn tricky stuff, especially when you're making a sequel to the beloved original trilogy. That said, I thought JJ did a brilliant job of introducing new characters while bringing back the originals. Yes, it was super-safe---TFA followed the same story beats as the original. But it worked and hinted at all kinds of exciting developments in films 2 and 3.

So at the time TLJ was being made, the franchise was at the pinnacle of its popularity. This time--for whatever reason--the filmmakers decided to subvert the audience's expectations instead of playing it 'safe' again. This creative approach might work in some movies or TV shows, but they were doing it with a major film franchise. It clearly didn't matter to them---the folks at LucasFilm were on Cloud Nine at the time. TFA was the blockbuster of all blockbuster films and they thought they could do no wrong with its follow-up.

But deliberately subverting the expections of their fans was a dangerous business---as Disney discovered. It's true the audience doesn't 'own' a franchise. But when the filmmakers ignore what made it special to them, they won't have to argue about who 'owns' or 'doesn't own' it because the fans won't care as much any more.

 

You don't make what you think the fans think they want/need to see. That's not what any star wars film has ever done.

Johnson did not "deliberately" or gratuitously set out to subvert expectations. He acknowledged that the story he felt compelled to write, picking up from where TFA left off and the hand JJ dealt him, might subvert some fan's expectations. But that interview was quickly construed by some as subversion being RJ's main intent and motivation.

A writer understanding that certain fans expectations might not be met is engagement. Not knowing or caring would be not engaging.

I don't think anyone can claim the TLJ doesn't appear to care that characters and events aren't going or going to go necessarily the way people might hope. It recognises it explicitly at several points.

 

Sorry, but everything about the film entertainment business shouts otherwise.

Giving people what they want is as ancient as the earliest days of storytelling around a campfire. It's no accident that the most popular storytellers told the same beloved stories to their audiences. In modern times, it explains why our most popular movies became film franchises.

You've admitted -- as I said -- that Johnson (with the backing of KK) made decisions they knew 'might' subvert fan expectations. Given the dramatic ending to TFA, pardon me if I'm sceptical that Johnson had no choice but to play 'the hand JJ dealt him.'

Huh? It certainly didn't engage me. And from the looks of the SW movie landscape since then, I wasn't alone.

I'm not arguing the filmmakers didn't know what they were doing. I'm simply saying their conscious decision to risk subverting expectations ruined the ST for many fans.

If it worked for you and others here, Super! No one here is asking you to change your opinion. Continue to enjoy it and discuss it here in your TLJ forum with other like-minded fans. But in open forums, let's refrain from playing revisionist history or mischaracterizing the sincerity of the fans who didn't like it. That ship sailed a long time ago now.

 

Great filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood and even George Lucas disagree with you.

They all said you make films for yourself in the first place, and you only hope an audience will embrace it afterwards.

That's what Rian Johnson did and always will do. He makes the films he wants to tell. You would do the same. We all do. Telling the story YOU want to see. But I guarantee you a lot of people would have dislike it as well.
Even though I'm not the biggest fan of TLJ- I for example would have hated seeing Luke all powerful and without any mistakes.

You simply can not please everyone and you shouldn't even try. I mean Star Wars is the best example for this. Try to please everyone and play it safe (TFA and TROS), people will hate it. Do something new (TLJ and the Prequels), people will hate it as well.

The only thing an audience can do is to express their likes and dislikes. But the process of filmmaking will never change. It all starts with one person (sometimes with a handful persons) coming up with a story he/she personally likes.

 

Guys...

There's no right answer to this tangent. There are artists who create art in both modes. Hitchcock very much creates with the audience directly in mind, while Tarkovsky famously did not.

Neither is superior. Both are valid.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Hitchcock's approach was actually more about "manipulating" the audience. He still followed his own vision and successfully made the viewer feel like it's their own vision.